Pay Per Click Fraud is an Internet crime with hefty consequences in many US states. It occurs in Pay Per Click Advertising when a person, automated script or computer program pretends to be a legitimate user making a legitimate click on an advertisement while in fact having ulterior motives.

The purpose of clicking on the advertisement is to generate a cost per click while not actually being interested in the product or service offered.While there are numerous sources of Fraudulent Clicks, the majority of Click Fraud comes from either competitors or publishers of the company or website in question.

The goal of competitors in initiating Pay Per Click Fraud tends to be in order to blow out an advertiser’s budget in order to increase the success of their own advertising campaigns by forcing their competition to lower their keyword bids or drop out altogether.

Some publishers, on the other hand, might decide to generate Fraudulent Clicks in order to increase their revenue. Publishers are website owners who work with search engines by featuring Pay Per Click Advertisements on their websites in a revenue-sharing system. Therefore, they receive part of the money spent on each click on advertisements on their pages.

Click Fraud can come in the form of an owner of a small website clicking on advertisements on its site to generate revenue. Or it can be large-scale fraud where automated scripts simulate a user clicking on Pay Per Click Advertisements.

With those generated by smaller websites, the number of clicks is often so small that the fraud can go unnoticed. With these types of Click Fraud, clicks that come from an IP address that belongs to a publisher or large numbers of clicks coming from just one source or geographic area look very suspicious and are more easily detected.

But, where Click Fraud is produced by non-contracting parties, such as competitors, it is much harder to patrol. They can’t be sued for breach of contract, for example, if they aren’t part of a Pay Per Click Advertising Agreement.

Competitors might even include those of publishers who want to frame a publisher for Click Fraud, making it look like the publisher was the one clicking on the advertisements. This could damage the reputations of publishers, who rely on advertising revenue. This is also hard to prove as the blame is more easily put on the publisher.

Click Fraud might also be instigated by those who have nothing to gain financially but wish to harm an advertiser or publisher. These cases are even harder to track.

Finding out who is liable for Click Fraud is very difficult to prove as it is almost impossible to know who made the clicks and what their intentions were. Therefore, the one of the only options available to Pay Per Click advertisers is to detect which clicks are likely to be fraudulent so that they are not charged.

Most search engines have very sophisticated detection tools and techniques for monitoring Pay Per Click Fraud. These Fraudulent Clicks are not charged to an advertiser’s account, and those that are picked up later are deducted from the account.

But it is important to highlight that search engines also receive the profits from Fraudulent Clicks that go undetected. While they certainly have no interest in Pay Per Click Advertisers becoming victims of Click Fraud, as this increases the chance of losing advertisers, the sheer size of search engines makes it difficult to detect the small click increases.

Pay Per Click Advertising experts, on the other hand, have nothing to gain from a client receiving Fraudulent Clicks. In fact, just the opposite. A Pay Per Click Consultant wants to ensure that its clients receive the best success possible in their Pay Per Click Advertising campaigns.

They also have the scope to focus on smaller numbers of clicks, increasing the chance that they will be able to detect Fraudulent Clicks.

Careful and constant monitoring to ensure that you are not a victim of Click Fraud is a key part of Webrageous Studios’ service, as witnessed in these Testimonial Videos.